Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
BY BRAD STRICKLAND
(based on John Bellairs’s characters)
The House Where Nobody Lived
The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost
The Tower at the End of the World
The Beast under the Wizard’s Bridge
The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost
The Specter from the Magician’s Museum
The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder
The Hand of the Necromancer
BOOKS BY JOHN BELLAIRS
COMPLETED BY BRAD STRICKLAND
The Doom of the Haunted Opera
The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie
The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder
The Ghost in the Mirror
BOOKS BY JOHN BELLAIRS
The Mansion in the Mist
The Secret of the Underground Room
The Chessmen of Doom
The Trolley to Yesterday
The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb
The Eyes of the Killer Robot
The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost
The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull
The Dark Secret of Weatherend
The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt
The Curse of the Blue Figurine
The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring
The Figure in the Shadows
The House with a Clock in Its Walls
DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by The Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand,
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Copyright © 2006 by Suzanne Bellairs and Frank Bellairs
eISBN : 978-1-440-67841-7
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Wizards—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S916703Ho 2006
[Fic]—dc22
2006001673
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Amy, my daughter,
who always sees the magic
—B.S.
CHAPTER 1
ON A BLISTERING SUMMER day, a boy and a girl were walking north on a weedy path near a highway in Michigan. The boy, whose name was Lewis Barnavelt, was puffing and sweating as he struggled to keep up with the girl. “It’s too hot for hiking,” Lewis complained. “Let’s go back home and play checkers or something.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. You need to explore!” returned the girl, whose name was Rose Rita Pottinger. She tossed her long, straight black hair and grinned back at him. “Besides, this isn’t a hike. It’s a stroll! C’mon, Lewis!” She strode along in front of him, swinging a stick and beheading tall burdock weeds and gangly dandelions as if they were enemy knights.
This was the way Lewis was later to remember it all beginning. At that time, he was just eleven years old and still fairly new in town. A little more than a year earlier, both of his parents had died in an awful car crash, and then the previous August, Lewis had come from Wisconsin to live with his uncle Jonathan in a wonderful old mansion at 100 High Street in New Zebedee, Michigan.
That first year had been hard. Lewis was overweight, clumsy at sports, and timid, and worst of all, he found it hard to make friends. True, some wonderful things happened. For one thing, he discovered that his cheerful, pot-bellied, red-bearded uncle Jonathan was a sorcerer, and not simply a conjurer who could do card tricks and pretend to pluck quarters from your ears, but a real magician who could wave his cane and summon up wonderfully lifelike three-dimensional illusions.
And their next-door neighbor, a retired school-teacher named Florence Zimmermann, wasn’t just a friendly, wrinkly-faced lady who loved to dress all in purple and cook delicious meals for Uncle Jonathan and Lewis, but she was also a maga, which Uncle Jonathan explained was just a fancy word for “witch.” As Lewis soon learned, Mrs. Zimmermann wasn’t an evil witch, but a good and kindly one, and her magic was even more powerful than Uncle Jonathan’s.
In a way, the best surprise of all was when Lewis met a new friend, the tall, dark-haired, homely girl named Rose Rita Pottinger, who was something of a tomboy and who knew the names of all kinds of cannons, from sakers to demi-culverins, from minions to falconets. Rose Rita took Lewis under her wing and, in the summer of his first full year in New Zebedee, she dragged him along on long walks around the area, pointing out this and that and reeling off the history of things like the stone Civil War Memorial and the round fountain in the center of town.
Lewis usually complained that after these walks his legs ached and his heels were blistered, but in fact he enjoyed listening to Rose Rita, who loved to talk about things she found interesting. He began to be interested too, and despite his grumbling, he was always secretly glad when Rose Rita turned up and suggested some new expedition.
On that particular sweltering July day they had hiked out north of town, where the road ran through woods before it reached farmland rich and green with fragrant corn. Rose Rita, dressed in a red T-shirt and jeans, was chopping off the heads of weeds with her stick, occasionally shouting, “Ha! Have at thee, varlet!” while Lewis plodded along behind her, with sweat pouring down his face. He flinched a little every time the stick chopped its way through another dandelion. Suddenly Rose Rita stopped dead in her tracks, and Lewis nearly blundered right into her. “That’s funny,” said Rose Rita in a thoughtful voice as Lewis staggered to a halt.
“What’s funny?” asked Lewis, fishing a crumpled handkerchief from the pocket of his brown corduroy pants and swabbing his dripping face. “Other than the fact that I’m about to have heatstroke?”
Rose Rita raised her stick to point dramatically off to the left. “That crooked old lane,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever explored it.”
Lewis gave the overgrown path a dubious look. The lane was barely a path at all, more an overgrown patch of treeless ground twisting and turning between the dark woods. “Not much there to look at,” he grunted. “If we’re going to explore, let’s walk on the way we’re going. You’ve got tons of wee
ds you haven’t killed yet.”
“Come on,” replied Rose Rita, raising her stick high overhead, like a cavalry officer urging his men onward with drawn sword. “We have met the enemy and he is ours! Full speed ahead! You may fire when ready, Gridley!” With that, she plunged away from the path beside the road and headed down the overgrown lane, between two thick stands of butternut and oak trees.
Lewis followed, but he got a creepy feeling in his stomach. Though the sun shone bright on the tall green weeds overgrowing the lane, deep shadows pooled like spilled ink beneath the trees. Anything could lurk there, snakes or wild animals. Lewis told himself to get a grip and reminded himself that they weren’t really far from home. This wasn’t the deep woods or anything, just a patch of trees on the outskirts of town. If he got too scared, he could probably run back to 100 High Street in less than five minutes. Rose Rita had courage to spare, though, and maybe some of it soaked into him. He swallowed hard and in his waddling trot he closed the distance until he was right behind Rose Rita again. “This is spooky,” he complained as they walked along, the tall grass and weeds swacking against his pant legs. “I don’t like the way the trees grow so close.”
“It’s like a real jungle,” agreed Rose Rita. “You might meet a tyrannosaur in here, or a giant anaconda, or maybe a grizzly or two. I wonder where this lane goes. It twists and turns too much to ever have been a regular street.”
“Maybe it was—” began Lewis. He broke off and exclaimed, “There’s a house.”
It was the most peculiar one he had ever seen. It stood in a patch of chest-high weeds and looked as out of place as a beached ocean liner. The main part of the building stretched out long, with a three-story-tall veranda running around it, the overhanging roof so wide that it cast everything under it in deep shade. Right in the center of the structure rose a sort of squarish tower yet another story tall, with a strange, curving, sharply peaked roof over an open platform at least forty feet off the ground. The house looked abandoned, though oddly undamaged. Its walls had been painted in shades of pale lime-green and pink and white.
“It looks Chinese,” muttered Lewis.
Rose Rita shook her head in an absentminded sort of way. “I don’t think so. I mean, that tower looks a little bit like a pagoda, but not really. But what I can’t figure out is why I’ve never heard of this place. My folks and I must’ve driven past that lane about a zillion times, but this is the first time I ever noticed it. Nobody’s lived here for years.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Lewis in an uneasy voice. He had just been imagining some crazy old geezer who would come roaring out of the house, carrying a shotgun, screaming his head off about trespassers.
“Elementary, Watson,” Rose Rita shot back. “The lane must have been the driveway to this place. But you saw how overgrown it was with horsetail and witchgrass and even butternut saplings. Nobody’s driven a car, or even a horse and buggy, down this way in ages. Come on, let’s take a closer look.”
Despite the heat, Lewis felt a little cold knot tie itself in his stomach. It was his curse to be not only timid, but also imaginative. He could picture the worst disasters in his mind, and once he had dreamed them up, it was almost as if they were all about to come true. “What if somebody’s in there?”
“Does it look like there’s anyone inside?”
“N-no,” agreed Lewis reluctantly. “But it’s not polite to go barging into somebody’s house.”
“We’re not going inside,” said Rose Rita. “We’re just going closer, that’s all.”
They edged forward. Years of rain and sun and wind had eroded the ground close to the house, so that a gully ran alongside the veranda, where rain had sheeted off and carved out a miniature ravine. They walked along the edge, with Rose Rita peering down through her round black-rimmed spectacles. She suddenly stooped and with a triumphant cry she picked up something white from the dirt. She thumbed some soil off and then held it up so that Lewis could see it. “An arrowhead?” he asked.
“Just the tip of one. You can have this one,” she said, dropping it into his palm. “I’ve found about a thousand of them.”
Lewis turned the small white chip over and over. A little longer than his thumbnail, it felt strangely smooth and rounded, not like stone at all. The edges, however, were sharp and serrated. He never found things like this. He and Rose Rita could be sauntering along the street, and she would bend down and pick up a fifty-cent piece that he had walked right past. He couldn’t figure out why he missed things like that, though Rose Rita insisted he just had to teach himself to be more observant. He carefully dropped the broken arrowhead into his shirt pocket.
“Funny,” Rose Rita said quietly. They had taken a long step across the wash-out and had stopped just in front of the wide steps that ran up to the veranda. “I wonder what happened to this place. It must have been abandoned years ago, but the paint isn’t all scabby and flaky. The windows are dirty, but none of them are broken, and you know how the other kids are when they come across an empty building. They pick up a few rocks, and there go the windows.”
“I don’t like this place,” insisted Lewis.
“I’m going up on the porch.”
“No, don’t.” Lewis swallowed hard. “It—it doesn’t feel right. It, uh, it could be some kind of a trap.”
Rose Rita tilted her head, her dark hair swinging around her face. “You sound like you think we’re in an episode of Lights Out.” That was a horror show on the radio. It came on late at night, and Lewis never listened to it, because if he heard even a little part of it, his dreams shambled with living mummies, shrieked with vicious bats, and dripped with a slow ooze of blood.
“I just don’t want to go up there,” muttered Lewis, ashamed of his own timidity.
“Then stay here,” returned Rose Rita, dropping her stick.
Lewis tried to gulp down the pounding lump in his throat as Rose Rita tested the steps one at a time, placing her feet carefully. “Seems to be sturdy enough,” she said. She walked across the veranda, and Lewis could hear the creaking of the boards beneath her feet. “Almost looks as if someone cleaned this from time to time,” she reported. “I mean, there are a few dead leaves here and there, but not the kind of mess you’d expect.” She made her way over to one of a number of tall, narrow windows and tried to gaze inside, cupping her hands up beside her eyes and leaning close. “Can’t see a thing—”
From somewhere close, so loud that it made Lewis’s heart thud, a drum boomed once.
CHAPTER 2
THE UNEXPECTED NOISE MADE both of them jump, and Rose Rita yelped in alarm. She leaped away from the window and sprang down from the veranda without even touching the steps. Lewis thought he was about to choke on his own thudding heart. The first echoing boom had been the loudest, but now he heard an insistent, angry drumming, coming from somewhere inside the mysterious house, a rhythm that seemed to say: “Doom-doom-doom-doom-doom.”
Rose Rita stopped beside him and grabbed the stick she had tossed aside. “What in the world is that?”
“Somebody inside,” said Lewis in a voice that sounded as if someone were smothering him. “My gosh, let’s go.”
Rose Rita shook her head. “Maybe it’s animals or something.” She raised her voice and yelled, “Hey!”
Sudden silence fell, even more frightening to Lewis than the drumming sound. Now it seemed to him as though the house were watching them, like a huge cat staring at a couple of mice that had ventured almost within reach. “Let’s go,” he groaned again.
“Maybe rats in the walls?” asked Rose Rita. “Or squirrels up in the attic?”
“I—don’t—care,” insisted Lewis doggedly. “Let’s get out of here. I’m going. Now.”
“Okay, okay,” said Rose Rita. “Keep your hair on your head.”
They turned and headed back down the twisting lane, Lewis taking the lead and walking so fast that Rose Rita had to hurry to keep up. At first everything was silent, but after a dozen steps o
r so, Lewis heard it again, that ominous rhythm that sounded as though someone were pounding on a drum off in the distance. Rose Rita gave no sign that she had heard it, though, and he was just as happy not to mention it. Somehow the shadows under the trees had grown even murkier, and from time to time Lewis could have sworn that someone—a whole group of people, in fact—was walking alongside them, dodging behind the trees, a row of grim figures in single file, keeping pace with the two kids. He had to force himself to look directly at them, and when he did, they vanished, melting into the green gloom beneath the trees.
The lane met the path near the highway, and as Lewis and Rose Rita stepped out onto the weedy shoulder, a second boom hit, so loud that Lewis flinched, feeling his knees give way, and Rose Rita yipped again.
But this time it was thunder. A purplish black cloud had rolled up from the west, and the two of them raced it back to 100 High Street, arriving just before the first huge drops of rain plopped down. The two of them hurried through the door, and behind them the storm battered the porch as the house across the street vanished behind a gray downpour.
“Here you are,” said Lewis’s red-bearded uncle Jonathan, coming out of the kitchen. “Mrs. Zimmermann and I were just about to set out to find you two. Lucky you got home when you did. Florence,” he said, raising his voice, “the stray sheep have returned to the fold, or to fold up, or something. I’d better give Rose Rita’s folks a call.”
In stormy weather, Uncle Jonathan never stayed on the phone long, because he always was afraid that lightning might run in on the lines and fry him, or so he said, but he did make a quick call to Mrs. Pottinger. When he hung up the phone, he said, “Your mother says to stay put until this blows over, Rose Rita, and that means you can sample some of Frizzy Wig’s best walnut-fudge brownies.”
Lewis gave a little grin. His uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann teased each other by thinking up insulting nicknames, but they were good-natured about it. Lewis felt the tension easing out of him as they sat around the kitchen table. The rain soon slackened to a steady, gentle shower, and Mrs. Zimmermann, wearing one of her baggy purple dresses, cheerfully pulled a pan of delicious, chocolatey, gooey brownies from the oven. They all had some of the warm bars with big glasses of cold milk, and before long Lewis’s heart had stopped feeling as if it were a cornered animal trying to batter its way out of a trap.
The House Where Nobody Lived Page 1